landing on water -its origins, but unsuccessfully

Air JetLiner Crashes into Sea


This was the moment that passengers held their breath. The landing of flight 961 in 1996 off the Comoro Islands, East Africa.

Fifty people survived. 125 people died on on the flight including one of the world's most respected cameramen/photojournalistst, Mohamed-Mo-Amin.

The circumstances leading to the crash were very different.

The video was shot a South African couple on their honeymoon in the region as they lay on the beach.

I was working at WTN at the time, which has since become APTV. WTN acquired the film and in a frenzied bidding right, and once acquired promptly sold it to the aviation industry, effectively making their money back.

The video's unique quality. It's the first and only time a commercial airline has been caught attempting a sea landing, which means it would have been studied by the airline industry.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's comments about how "incredibly brave" Captain Chesley Sullenberger and his crew were in landing their US Airways Airbus A320 safely on water is being universally acknowledged.

The South Africa couple who shot this video may have had an unwitting hand in events more than a decade later.